The poster and programme cover shows a haka in full flight: the vigour, the intense pride, the colour and character of it projected by rangatahi/young people with a mission – to communicate their passion for Shakespeare performance. Since the spine-chilling haka Tika Tonu is used to close the show, this is the image we go away with. A total of 48 selected students – some still wearing the costumes they played in – come together as a team on stage to celebrate the end of this year’s Dunedin-based National Shakespeare Schools Production.

But this is neither the end nor the beginning of the process that brought them here. In its 31st year of operation, Shakespeare Globe Centre New Zealand has grown from mounting seven regional festivals to involving 24 regions in these preliminary gatherings now called – using the names of their two major sponsors – University of Otago Sheila Winn Shakespeare Festivals (UOSWSF). From these regional festivals, 22 Direct Entry students were nominated by the assessors to come to SGCNZ NSSP, and a further 24 were added from participants in the National UOSWSF, held annually in Wellington.

The performers we see have been participating in a week of workshops and intensive rehearsals of short scenes from three plays, collated by three different directors. As the 24-page programme explains, the students are all assessed to choose half of them to represent New Zealand as members of the SGCNZ UOSWSF Young Shakespeare Company 2023. Those 24 actors will travel to the UK next year for a study and performance course based in London’s rebuilt Shakespeare Globe, and also in Stratford-on-Avon, running from 30 June to 19 July.

Despite the emphasis on individual selection, I feel the SGCNZ NSSP gives a prodigious example of the value of teamwork, in ensemble acting, but also in the integration of music, costume and movement , taught by tutors experienced in things like group singing, historical weaponry and dance. Because teamwork was required in all parts of the production, I will not be detailing individual performances except in sharing what I thought were highlights of the achievements of various teams. There are many more than three; they are teams within teams.

The seven short scenes from Henry IV Part 2,  directed by Jono Price, canvassed the comedy of Falstaff’s questionable relationship with the authorities, and the easy bonds he shares with young Prince Hal and their drinking companions at the inn. The montage also reveals, in complete contrast, the near-tragedy of Hal’s relationship with his ailing father, Henry 1V, and Falstaff’s rejection by the new Hal, now King Henry V.

The moments I will remember come from both halves of the presentation.The first involves the second of the three Falstaffs, Jacob Waugh, and his interactions with Mistress Dorothy/Doll Tearsheet (Libby Frazer) and the tavern hostess Mistress Quickly, played by Markus Yearbury-Murphy. While the latter had good body-language, he spoke a little too fast at first, but Libby Frazer, as a woman of quintessentially easy virtue, had both the body-language and the vocal range as she sparred with everyone around her. Developing comic themes were capped by her sustained and mind-bending shriek at the height of the first of two well-choreographed tavern brawls.

Then again, the tragedy of a dying king fair took my breath away. Louie Skinner mustered all his experience (this being his 4th year of involvement in SGCNZ) to become King Henry IV, bent and nearly broken, but still retaining a monarch’s dignity, making an emerald green dressing-gown look like a royal robe, and a high-backed wooden chair like a throne. All his lines were enunciated with clarity and understanding, and at the right speed, the team supporting him  helping to maintain the sense of his authority, like the subjects they were. His anger at Hal mistakenly “stealing” his crown, thinking he was dead, was particularly poignant.

Director Terry MacTavish created a very tight structure for her excerpts, with three different actors playing each of the parts of Othello, Iago, Desdemona and Emilia, giving their performances often simultaneously in scenes of elopement, deception, murder and discovery. It’s very hard to pick out the best of these; all were carefully crafted. The themes were often heightened by echoed repetition, or by sharing speeches, as when the three Iagos (Eli Hancock, Ryan Murray and Tama Porter) finished each other’s lines. This was a technique effectively used by other directors too.

After a pensive introductory dance, you could see all the players using movement to express emotions, particularly tender ones; the Emilias, for instance, continued to act like a chorus, stroking their mistresses after Desdemonas was first accused, and later too. At one point, they were given the words from Othello’s mouth, six women intoning the atmospheric lament,”Farewell the tranquil mind.” The defiant Emilia, though, had her time to speak out alone, all three players (Matekohe Gates, Matilda Vahey-Bourne and Sarah Watene) understanding her pivotal place in the plot. And the three Desdemonas (Daisy De La Haye, Lily Brophy, Kelea Wendleborn) movingly expressed their anguish, in what amounted to a triple tragedy.

Because Desdemona and Emilia both have the capacity for defiance, it’s again a team of six women who shouted out in unison the famous fight-back words: ‘These men!’ I do not mean the actors playing men lacked sensitivity, just that the female characters – who are given far fewer lines in the original – were allowed to rise to the occasion in a striking way. Equally potent was Sukena Shah, incorporating the characters of the Duke and Lodovico, doing a proud, articulate female version of the same authority I admired in Louie Skinner’s Henry IV.

            Hakaia Daly, directing scenes from Twelfth Night, had the misfortune of making his presentation last in the running order, after two nights of the three-part programme, when the end (after some fabulous whole-company songs and a haka) was in sight. There was a sense in which the “chaotic love-crossed world” he was conveying became like the Revels imagined by Shakespeare and abhorred by some within the play. The generally festive air meant that Orsino, for instance, was not really bound in melancholy; and some individuals stole the show by clowning unashamedly. Can this be done with discipline? After viewing a fair few riotous Twelfth Nights, I believe it can. And of course I enjoyed the Box Tree team baiting Malvolio (Eva Weld), and the high comedy of Feste as Sir Topaz, Taipuhi Te Koha King adding in a slick moon walk and a creditable cartwheel. (Well, he is supposed to play the Fool).

If I ever had any doubts about the strange mixture of celebration and testing that characterizes this annual production, they melted away with the exuberant response of the audience. Some actors will be standouts, who have had to be assessed for their leading status to be confirmed; but all in fact are winners, in a celebration of talent that gives everyone a standard to aspire to.

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